Freddy wants to impress his roller skating friends with his skills, and he’s going to do this by skating around several obstacle courses. The game is divided into two parts. The Car Park Challenge consists of four courses which have been laid out in a car park. You must impress the judges by performing stunts, while not crashing too much or becoming too tired. If you don’t impress them enough, you must repeat the level. The Championship Course is more like a platform game in which you must simply reach the end of each level without losing all of your lives. The graphics are colourful and the music is absolutely marvellous, and although the Championship Course is merely OK to play, the Car Park Challenge is such great fun that you’ll want to try it out again and again.

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Rating: 8/10

Join Lester on five different skateboarding events – the ramp, high jump, downhill course, pool jousting (!), and the jam (a fight in a back yard). You can practice an event or compete in all five. They’re all boring, anyway; there is a very limited number of moves you can perform on the ramp, and the downhill course and the jam scroll too slowly to make it exciting. These two events are in monochrome, while the rest of the game uses full colour (but still very poor) graphics. It gives the impression that the game has been put together in an inconsistent and rather slapdash manner.

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Rating: 4/10

The Slime Rats are the coolest skateboarding gang in town, although I don’t know why they call themselves the Slime Rats – the name doesn’t sound very cool to me! To join the gang, you must tackle a series of courses, collecting eight flags in each. The graphics are appalling, there are no sound effects (although you have to listen to some irritating tunes before and after each course), and the gameplay is just as bad. The scrolling between screens is annoying and the collision detection is suspect as well. Maybe it’s not quite as bad as it sounds, but it could have been a lot better.

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Rating: 5/10

While the CPC didn’t get a conversion of Speedball or its legendary sequel, it did get a couple of futuristic sports games to call its own. This one is OK. You start by assembling your team. Each player has their own attributes and character portraits which is a nice touch. The game is played on an ice rink. It’s two-on-two with you controlling the outfield player. To begin with the rink is bare and matches consist of barging your opponent off the ball and trying to force the ball past the opposition keeper. Things step up a notch as obstacles and hazards are added to the rink. This allows you to kill other players so your replacements come into play. It’s not always about scoring the most goals. The graphics are detailed and scroll pretty well. However this is a better game with two players.

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Rating: 7/10

Tom Essex woke up one morning and found that all of his super powers had now disappeared, and he was no longer Superkid – but he continues his mission to clear the streets of criminals. Armed with his skateboard and catapult, Tom has to skate around six stages and collect nine banknotes on each one, while avoiding the muggers or firing at them. Contact with the muggers loses energy, and if you lose too much, the game is over. After completing a stage, there is a bonus stage which allows you to collect more points. The music is very good, and the graphics are OK as well, and Tom zooms around each stage at some speed. However, the muggers are hard to avoid and appear randomly on each screen, and progressing to subsequent stages is more a matter of luck than skill.

See also: Superkid, Superkid in Space.

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Rating: 6/10

The legendary Skool Daze arrives on the CPC with a slight delay of only 31 years! In this original game, you take control of Eric, who must steal his report card by accomplishing various tasks. Four teachers and three pupils play a major role, while there are many other unnamed pupils wandering around. Eric must try not to be punished because of his or other students’ actions. If he receives 10,000 lines, he is expelled and the game is over. This is a direct Spectrum port, so everything is faithful to the original release. What I mostly enjoyed about this game is its atmosphere and the tricks that Eric must do to achieve his objective. The sound is negligible but the grab factor is strong and the overall game is very entertaining although it clearly shows its age.

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Rating: 7/10

The Evil Sorcerer has captured several beautiful women, and your mission is to rescue them and defeat the Sorcerer, who adopts various disguises throughout the eight levels of this platform game. One Eye (and Red Dog if two people are playing) must board pirate ships, explore a variety of lands, kill a lot of the Sorcerer’s henchmen, and collect lots of treasure in the process. Sword fighting techniques will not take long to master, although finding the right methods for dealing with some of the tougher henchmen will be a bit more tricky. The graphics are colourful, although the music doesn’t fit in well with the pirate theme – and if you only have 64K of memory, you will only hear silence! Overall, this is a fairly satisfactory game, although the scrolling is very jerky, and the controls are slightly awkward.

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Watch a YouTube video of this game by: Xyphoe.

Rating: 7/10

Many years ago, Skweek’s planet was contaminated with a blue skweekicide by aliens. Now you’re going to change all 99 continents back to their original colour – pink! Each level consists of a board of tiles, and there are all sorts of hazards – monsters, arrow tiles, ice, and crumbling tiles are just some of them, but there are also a large range of bonuses. The graphics are extremely cute, and Skweek is so small and furry! There are two tunes to select, but they’re rather too cute for my liking. You can switch them off, though. All in all, this game is so amazingly excellent that there’s no way you can’t like it.

See also: Super Skweek, Tiny Skweeks.

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Rating: 10/10

Skyfox has all the makings of a good game. A cool, state of the art plane to fly against a variety of air- and ground-based alien foes who are intent on destroying your home base. It features a variety of mission types and the difficulty can be altered. There are different weapons to try out and a helpful status map. The idea behind the game is a good one as well. What appears at first to be a flight simulation is in fact more of an arcade shoot-’em-up/flight simulation hybrid, so it’s not overly complicated. So all good then? Unfortunately not. This game is held in reasonably high regard on other formats, but on the CPC it’s a bit of a technical disaster – good-looking graphics one minute and glitches the next. It has an unfinished feel. The engine noise will set your teeth on edge after a while as well, while the gameplay can start to feel shallow. It could and should have been better.

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Rating: 5/10

The Emperor’s son has been kidnapped by the ruler of a faraway planet and you have been sent to rescue him. However, the sword that symbolises his power has been broken up into six pieces. Firstly, you will need to locate and break into the ruler’s lair and meet him face to face. Then you must find six rebels who hold the pieces of the sword and give them an object in exchange. In this icon-driven adventure, you explore the planet in a tank, and during your hunt you’ll frequently encounter other aliens that you must shoot before you can continue. Your ammunition, shield and fuel are all limited, so it’s important to conserve your resources. The game is beautifully presented, with excellent graphics accompanying each location. However there isn’t a lot of depth to the gameplay, but despite this it’s still a decent game overall.

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Watch a YouTube video of this game by: Metr81.

Rating: 7/10